VMworld Europe 2017 – Day 2

Day 2 key notes included a Q&A session where people could submit questions the previous day and they would answer some of them. They also demo’d a made up company called Elastic Sky Pizza which showed the breadth of the VMware offering including VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware AppDefence, vRealize Operations and VMware Cloud on AWS.

Recent announcements around Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and VMware AppDefence were covered. PKS is a collaboration with Pivotal and Google to create a container platform. AppDefense looks interesting, its a product that leverages virtual infrastructure to monitor running applications, it can take an intended state and use that to detect problems and automate responses.

My first session of the day was – Skip the security slow land with VMware Cloud on AWS.

This was fairly high level and not what I was expecting, it did show briefly how to run anti malware from Trend Micro in a hybrid cloud.

I then skipped some session to join an ‘Meet the Expert’ session run by Frank Denneman, this was a round table discussion about the service. Frank couldnt give away anything new but it was good to be able to ask someone direct about the service. I got confirmation around NSX between the AWS site and the on-premises, currently MTU settings are limited by AWS to 1500 but hopefully this will change soon allowing to stretch NSX. I got further confirmation its only one AZ currently and connection between the sites is L3 IPsec VPN.

The next general session I attended was a chance to look at something new for, it was – VMware Integrated OpenStack and NSX integration deep dive.

It stared with the comparison between vRA and VIO for a IaaS solution.

The session then went on about the OpenStack ecosystem and covered the networking piece Neutron.

and how Neutron can plug into NSX.

The session then went over of all the security integrations.

Ill not show all of these integrations but I will show the micro-segmentation slide.

The final session I had was – Basics of Kubernetes on BOSH: Run production-grade Kubernetes on SDDC.

We went over how infrastructure can now be consumed with an example.

and what tools may be used currently.

BOSH was then introduced and why it was chosen, BOSH is an open source tool for release engineering, lifecycle management and monitoring of distributed systems. They also showed how its deployed.

That was BOSH, they then went on to go over what Kubernetes was and what its capabilities. Kubernetes was something I looked into on my VDM but didnt get a chance for some hands on, I will be looking to pick that back up over the coming months.

The session then went on to show a Kubernetes cluster from a high level.

It then finished by showing how PKS brings this all together, and explained how mutliple Kubernetes clusters can be deployed.

That was it for me on day 2 with some big sessions I still need to catch up on online. The day finished with the VMware party that this year included Kaiser Chiefs which went down well with the crowd.

I didnt make much of day 3 as it was spent travelling but there was some really good sessions I would like to have seen so I will be catching up online. All in all another great VMworld, its an exciting time in tech and its good to see VMware’s vision the next few years could be very exciting.